Did TV journalists broadcast Iraq war propaganda?

Throughout my career I've heard journalists talk about the need to be "objective" and they still say it despite widespread evidence that objectivity is impossible to achieve. Further proof that they are hopelessly wrong in clinging to that belief comes today in the form of a study that reveals that TV news outlets in different countries have reported the war in Iraq differently. Perhaps the most important finding is that each of the stations, despite their claims to objectivity, tended to toe their own government's line on the conflict.

The study has a high-falutin title: Framing the war on terror and Iraq: A cross-national perspective. And its findings were revealed on Monday at an academic conference organised by the International Communication Association in Dresden, Germany. But this is the kind of academic paper that deserves the widest possible airing to enable journalists, especially those who work for public service broadcasters and who therefore think their work is so fair and balanced that it's beyond reproach, to question both their motives and their methods. Essentially, what this study reveals is the susceptibility of journalists to an old-fashioned patriotism that inevitably leads them to publish a form of propaganda. It would appear that they do this unconsciously.

The study - produced by the German-based research institute, Media Tenor - analysed TV news coverage by stations in Germany, Britain, the US, the Czech Republic, South Africa, and from Qatar's al-Jazeera at the start of the war in 2003. As I say, it reveals just how strongly TV news coverage was influenced by the political climate in different countries. In the US, for example, which led the war coalition and where politicians were relatively united behind the invasion, the tone of TV news coverage of the Iraqis was the most negative. In a further comparison it was clear that compared with America's TV news, the Arab-language news channel al-Jazeera and the German satellite channel Deutsche Welle featured almost twice as much information on the political background of the war. As one of the report's authors, Christian Kolmer, noted: "The results suggest that, in times of war or crisis, media coverage tends to toe the government's line." This is hardly a new insight. But it can't be said often enough because too many journalists and editors like to think it isn't so.

One revelation that I think is new was the section devoted in the study to the influence between the tone of the coverage and the embedding of journalists. Kolmer said: "The analysis... shows that there is a connection between the dominant issues in the coverage and whether or not a country's media had embedded journalists." On German TV news, which had no journalists embedded with troops, there was more coverage of the role of journalists in the war - a share of 7% of all reports - than on the US news programmes, which did use embedded journalists and had a share of only 2.3% of all reports. In other words, there was less questioning of the role of embedding among news stations which used the system. The full report has yet to be published but its implications are obvious: news is what your particular news outlet in your particular country says it is. There is no objectivity even when journalists passionately believe they are free from bias.